I’ve only been on this Twitter thing for a week and no sooner do I arrive late to the party than someone calls the cops and breaks the whole thing up. It must be my fault and I can almost hear my mother yelling, “See? This is why we can’t have nice things”!

Twitter, for those who are still firmly entrenched under their rocks, is essentially a social networking site/medium that is built around an individual’s “status”. I’m not suggesting one preceded (or was inspired by) the other but for descriptive value, if you take your one line “status” updates and extract them from the rest of Facebook, you (more or less) have Twitter. You create an account and bang out a couple of lines to reflect what you are doing and that status update can be as frequent, as topical or as insipid as each individual user wishes. The second layer is that Twitter users can “follow” (or track/subscribe to) the status updates of other users to get this sort of stream of consciousness, “RSS feed” that rolls those updates into their own Twitter account. When you add the accessibility of the Internet, SMS and Smartphones on the go and mix in a healthy dose of the “I’m interesting” blog generation, you have a viral hit on your hands.

Now this would be the sort of thing that would normally cause me to recoil in horror, not sign up for an account and for the longest time, I did the former rather than the latter – until the fantasy football community got a hold of it. This is where we seemingly broke Mom’s favorite vase.

What is this all of a sudden, the Celebrity Rapture? First Ed McMahon dies, then Farrah Fawcett loses her well publicized bout with cancer. A scant few hours later, Michael Jackson is pronounced dead from cardiac arrest. In fact, I just heard that Billy Mays died after taking a bump on the head during a plane landing, though his celebrity status remains mostly with the unemployable and 900 number "hot talk" crowds accordingly. There should be no doubt which one of the aforementioned celebrities I'm going to focus my article on today though. For better or worse, it's the same one everybody else is.

To be honest, I am with the general public that Michael Jackson was a legend... an industry icon even. His contributions to pop music extend into artists of the genre today and probably will for years and decades to come. He had a slew of Billboard hits and sold hundreds of millions of albums. I was certainly a fan in the "Off the Wall", "Thriller", and "Bad" eras, but Dangerous is where he pretty much lost it for me. Even as his music career began sliding into decline, he still remained relevant to the public. Mostly for the allegations of child molestation of course, but people did still care what he had to say. That is, if only to goof on it or sling it around as fodder for tabloids, late night talk show monologues and stand-up comedy acts the world over... and that's precisely my point.